What's Important and What's Urgent for Malaysia?

What's the one single most important issue Malaysia should fix First?

Malaysia is faced a whole plethora of issues, it's not a question of how we fix them but rather which one to fix first. The consequences of picking the wrong issue to fix would be borne by our children rather than us.

Most people would respond "It's the economy, stupid!", but like I said before we've moved well beyond the economy crisis of '97, but not the judicial crisis of '88. So I don't really think the economy is the one single most important issue Malaysia should fix first.

The above grid was taken from A Girls Guide to Project Management (a cool blog for both Girls and Guys)

It summarizes out how you should arrange your work/project etc. By identifying things based on their importance and urgency.

Importance is defined as something that has great significance or value.

Urgency is defined as something that compels immediate action.

So once you've defined everything that's on your plate in terms of Importance and Urgency you'd categorized them into 4 groups and work on them. The Grid is a useful (and simple) tool to maximize the value of your work.

This blog obviously isn't about Project management OR work in general.

"If you were Prime Minister what issues would be in which quadrants of the Grid?"

Let's say you'd only have to pick from the following 12 issues:

1) Swine Flu
2) Kugan Cases
3) Improving our civil service
4) Increasing women representation in Goverment
5) Increasing broadband penetration
6) Changing the ways we deal with Refugees
7) Abolishing the ISA
8) Addressing poverty
9) Addressing the Conversion Issue
10) Judicial Reform
11) Improving the Police Force
12) The Economy

I left out many other key issues like Poverty, Racial Equity, Disabled Access, Public transport, Open tenders , Perak MB..etc etc etc. That just gives us an idea of just how many key issues there are.

If I were PM I'd probably Arrange them like this:

My single most important issue to fix is the Judiciary, restoring it's independence and it's integrity. Peoples confidence will be restored as a result, there will be no issue taking things to court. As it stands, nobody I know truly believes that either the Police or the Judiciary are independent.

The Economy and Swine flu are urgent but for different reasons. Swine flu needs to be contained, and it has to be kept away from our borders. Ultimately though, in the long run it does not make our future brighter, though it has the potential to make our future a lot DARKER. We can't do much about the economy, we are a small player in the global world, and we need to sustain our people by addressing poverty, rather than trying to fix something beyond our control.

Improving Civil Service, Increasing women representation or broadband penetration, while important as a whole, rank far lower in terms of importance and urgency when measured up against the rest. I'm not saying their not important, but if we had to pick one thing to fix first...these wouldn't be it.

I guess at the end of it all, the most important thing you can take away from this post (and you should), is if someone ask you what's the one single most important issue Malaysia should fix first, you should have an answer.

My answer would be the Judiciary.....what about you?

That's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place.